


“Hello, My Name is H̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ Adam”

by SecretGeniusShittyKnight (augopher)



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe: Supernatural Creatures, Angst with a Happy Ending, Golems, Hypothermia, M/M, Mutual Pining, belief is a powerful thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 11:06:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8399335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/augopher/pseuds/SecretGeniusShittyKnight
Summary: Adam was created in 1701. Three hundred and thirteen years later, he learned to love. Shame no one else saw it that way.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 13 Days of Halloween hosted by [omgericzimmermann](http://omgericzimmermann.tumblr.com/13-days-of-halloween) on Tumblr.
> 
> Title partially comes from Highly Suspect's ['My Name is Human'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljvZ928YGrQ)  
> Characters do not belong to me, they are the creation of Ngozi Ukazu

Adam had a heart of stone. That was not to say he was cold and unfeeling. He had a heart of stone, or more accurately, of clay. Everything about him was of the Earth. Unlike those around him that he had watched grow and age for centuries, he was not of flesh, nor was he of blood. Just clay. It was the way he had always been, the way he would _always_ be. Since he was fashioned by his creator back in the old country, Adam had known no other way.

In the spring of 1701, Chayyim Sheinfeld fashioned Adam out of loamy clay he procured from the nearby Black Forest. Then, over the span of many months, he labored over his creation giving it the same care he would any of his wooden sculptures and then some. The result was Adam, far from the imperfect man of mud folklore described his kind as. No, Adam was, in a word, beautiful. For his niece, Liora deserved a wedding gift of no less than perfection.

As fine a piece of craftsmanship as he was, Adam was not brought to life for many years. Liora Zimmermann, it seemed, was skeptical of the truth she’d heard in legend. And yet…though he remained, stagnant in the corner of that farmhouse for over fifty years, he saw everything, learned and absorbed all he could. What else was there for him to do?

In fact, he never took a single step on Prussian soil, and it wasn’t until a young Canadian soldier received him as a gift from his dying grandfather after the war for American independence and traveled to Quebec that Adam even moved on his own volition.

Faced with the prospect of settling a new farm all on his own, Ariel Zimmermann, a believer in old stories, wrote a shem on a piece of paper. Then, he rolled it up and placed it in Adam’s mouth. Almost a century after he’d been created, Adam finally took his first steps. From then on, he toiled, never tiring, on the Zimmermann farm. He helped to raise their children, and when Ariel passed, so too did Adam, from father to son.

It continued on like that throughout the generations, and yet, he always felt part of the family despite his lack of a soul. Rubbish, he often thought. He felt deeply, cared for the Zimmermann family as much as anyone could. It was just different. Often, he’d heard them speak of love, been hugged by children who barely came up to his knee as they professed their feelings about him. He learned, was taught, evolved and grew even if he never aged a day.

One day, he watched his current master, Bob, they called him, go into a frenzy over his young son. See, Jack played hockey much like his father had, much like Adam had learned to play. But Jack was a nervous sort of boy, always worried, often afraid, and it weighed on him. Adam never quite understood him, and Jack never really warmed up to him. He supposed that he couldn’t be loved by everyone, though it stung when six year old Jack had yelled at him. “T'exist pas. T'as pas d'emotions,” he’d said.

It hurt because it was true. Though he cared for them, did he love them? He wasn’t sure.

As Adam would soon find out, Jack had taken too much of his medication, and was close to death. Even if he’d never shared that bond with him the way he had with so many of the family’s children in the past, he still ached with the thought of him passing so young. Jack, though, was a fighter. He clawed his way back.

In a gift fit for a new chapter in his life, Jack received Adam on his twenty-first birthday. Excitement–Adam had learned that emotion years ago–bristled in his body. Even if it wasn’t real, he believed it to be. So it was.

However, Jack had a different plan for him, and that plan was to remove the shem from Adam’s mouth before leaving for college. He left him in his childhood bedroom, in the dark, alone. For over two hundred years, Adam had lived alongside the Zimmermann family, had been accepted as one of them, and Jack had left him.

Adam would never forgive him for that.

 

 

***

 

In the early morning hours, Adam stared up at the bottom of the bunk above him where he knew Ransom was sleeping. Every school night for the past two years, he’d counted Ransom’s breaths as he slept. There was a soothing cadence to them; they calmed his mind. For what else was he supposed to do with the long nights when everyone else slept?

Learn another language? He knew so many already. Devour yet another TV show? Even that could lose its appeal. The point was, Adam yearned for more. He longed for a life, a real life. One where he could age, bleed when he hurt himself, or hurt at all for that matter. He could be loved…truly. Why had Jack bothered to reanimate him two years ago if he didn’t even like him?

Short explanation? Adam was a fantastic hockey player, and a certain someone’s need to ‘be better’ had lent him the idea. What if Adam came to college with him, what if he went to school? There, he could learn to be more real. As if three hundred years on this planet hadn’t lent him enough knowledge of human’s ways.

To everyone outside the team, he was merely Adam Birkholtz of Buffalo. To the team, well they knew, saw him for what he truly was…a monster. Just remembering the look of revulsion on their faces when he came to the team in Jack’s sophomore year brought tears to his eyes. Well it would have if he could cry, which he couldn’t.

Somehow, the team had come to see him as a friend. That was good. Adam liked having people to care for. He liked feeling useful. After all, he had been built to serve.

Ransom, however, had immediately found him fascinating. He would ask Adam all kinds of questions. What was it like, seeing how Canada changed over the years (for as interested in history as Jack was, he never thought to pick Adam’s brain about witnessing history unfold from a firsthand experience), how did his kind work, had one ever gone rogue? Adam delighted in answering him, delighted in telling him…everything.

One night, whilst Ransom lay awake worried about an exam in the morning, Adam had said too much. ‘ _When I was younger, I used to dream of seeing the world, the places I heard the Zimmermann’s speak about so often_ ,’ he’d told him. ‘ _Holster, you’re a golem, made of clay. You can’t dream_.’ It was like hearing Jack’s angry words all over again.

 

 

 

 

 

> _T'as pas d'emotions._
> 
> _T'exist pas._
> 
> _T'exist pas._
> 
> _T'exist pas._

That was the thing though. Sometimes, all that something needed to be real was for someone to believe in it. Adam was well read, had devoured knowledge over the centuries. He knew of the concept of tulpa, that an object could be created though mental discipline alone. If he believed hard enough, surely he could be real.

When the darkness of night gave way to daybreak, he sighed, counting the moments until Ransom’s alarm would go off.

Something had changed in him over the three years at Samwell. He’d began to feel the beginnings of a new emotion last year. At first, it had scared him, the strange flutter in his chest. It had never been there before. Not when he was angry or excited, so what had changed? It took him many months of pondering through the night, but eventually he figured it out.

As soon as he saw Ransom at Niagara falls that summer, when Jack would hand him over like a child in a custody battle, the fluttering happened again. He became more aware of the sensation after that, and it always seemed to happen around Ransom. Then, a strange warmth would fill his earthen body.

On the team, there was this small forward. The team called him Bitty. Bitty liked to make videos. He called them vlogs; Adam thought it seemed more like a diary, but to each their own. He was getting off topic. Anyway, one day, as Adam passed Bitty’s room on the way to the stairs into the attic, he overheard him say ‘ _Never fall for a straight guy_ ’. Confused by the meaning of Bitty’s words, Adam retreated to his room and turned on his laptop (if someone had tried to tell him back when he first came to life that computers would happen one day, he’d have laughed in their face).

As he read the definition, he found himself revisiting the idea of love, and he did something he’d never thought to do about anything he felt. He looked it up. _What does love feel like?_ The more he read, the more he recognized the change that had happened in him. He had learned to feel love?

He loved Ransom.

That was over a month ago. Which led him to where he was now, waiting for Ransom to wake up, because he could not keep his feelings locked up any longer.

Once Ransom’s alarm sounded, Adam waited for him to begin moving about the room before swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. Grounding himself with both feet flat on the floor always seemed to remind him from where he’d come and how much he’d changed. It was a good feeling.

“You okay, Holster?”

Adam blinked at him. What an odd thing to say. No one had ever asked him how he was before. Anyone who bothered to talk to him seemed to understand it was mostly pointless, for a golem did not have feelings. Not real ones anyway.

“I…I’ve been around a long time.”

“Yeah,” Ransom said, eyeing him with suspicion, “I know. You’ve told me many times.”

Adam nodded. “Right but, in all this time, I haven’t…I-” If he had lungs, he surely would have taken a deep breath then. “I love you.”

Silence settled over the room, and he watched a series of emotions flash over Ransom’s face. Observing the living long enough, Adam had become an expert at reading facial expressions. First, it was skepticism, then came amusement, then a brief look of disgusted anger, and then his face went blank. Ransom lay a hand on his shoulder and looked down at him.

“Holster, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you do. You might care about me because Jack has told you that you should, but… you can’t love me. It’s not in your making. A golem cannot love.”

An odd ache bloomed in his chest, where he knew a human’s heart to be. Stunned–pain was a foreign concept to him–he tried to remain still, and not give anything away. Especially not to begin trembling the way his body seemed to want to. Nor did he try and rub away the pain.

“You think Jack has told me to care for people he says are my friends?”

“He is your master.”

Over the years, Adam had developed some more human mannerisms, licking his lips when he was bothered by something for example. “He has never told me to befriend anyone. He doesn’t even _like_ me. The only reason he reactivated me at all was because the team needed a defenseman and his family had sway. He thinks of me like a robot. That’s fine. My first master kept me inanimate in the corner all her life. Not everyone is going to like me.” He blinked several times; his eyes felt gritty and strange like dust brushing off him in the winter. “Enough have loved me over my lifetime. I have made friends, companions that I enjoy spending time with. No one has ever told me to befriend anyone. They’ve never needed to. Are you saying I can’t understand friendship either?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then are you implying that you’re not my friend, nor I yours?”

Ransom shook his head. “I am not saying that either.”  Sadness spread across his face. Sadness and regret as though he were about to break bad news. “Holster, I don’t doubt that you care for me. I just don’t think it is love.”

Adam was being torn in two. Or it sure felt like he was. “If I were a real person, you wouldn’t dare tell me what I felt was fake.”

“You’re probably right, but you’re not…real. You were made.”

“So were you.”

Ransom sat beside him. “It isn’t the same. I am a person, living and breathing. And you? You are none of those things. I’m sorry, but it’s true,” he said in a voice gentle like one would use to speak to a child…or beloved pet. Adam hated it.

He chewed on his bottom lip, so hard he could taste the mustiness of damp soil. “I could be”

“That’s not how it works, Holster. I realize this is horribly unfair to you, that you only experience ideas of actual emotions that you have learned to mimic. But it’s the way things are.“

Adam stood up so fast, the bed shook. "You don’t know that! You… really don’t know anything,” he said, his voice breaking. If he didn’t experience real feelings, then what the hell did his words crack for?

***

The woods around him had long since grown dark, and yet, Adam remained against the same tree trunk he’d been sitting in front of for hours now. He’d always found his limbs too long, too gangly, but now they weren’t nearly long enough to wrap around himself. If he squeezed hard enough, could he crush himself? Would he send his body of clay back to the Earth where it came from?

He ached everywhere, and for how long he’d been curious what pain felt like, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know anymore. Not if it meant that no one would ever believe he was real, genuine in his words or feelings.

Why did Chayyim make him all those years ago? Why anything?

Beside him, he reached out and curled his fingers in the dirt, picking up a handful before letting it fall through his fingers. His love was real; he was sure of it. Everything about him felt different. That grittiness he’d first felt in his eyes intensified and now trailed down his face like rain. Silt had puddled on his knees. Somehow in the last day, he’d learned to cry, but even that was merely dirt. Three hundred years was plenty of time “serving,” and he’d been so good at it, never asking for a thing in return.

He didn’t want to do it anymore.

If he took the shem out of his own mouth would he return to stone? Maybe he’d become dust in the wind. The thought didn’t bother him as much as it should have, but then… he wasn’t real and neither were his feelings. His pained chuckle at his sarcasm echoed in the night.

As he shifted, something in his back pocket crinkled. He’d been in such a hurry to flee the Haus, he’d pulled on yesterday’s clothes.  What if… A thought bloomed in his mind, and he felt around in the dark until his fingers found a patch of damp earth. He daubed a twig in it until the end of it was thick with mud. With only the light of the moon to guide him, he scrawled on the back of the receipt in his pocket.

“Please let this work. Please,” he whispered.

When finished, he rolled the paper tightly and slipped it between his teeth until it joined the shem he kept under his tongue. _I am real. I am real. Please, make me real. Make me breathe and feel, and love. Please_.

He kept repeating that mantra in his head, until the first glint of sunlight peeked over the horizon.

All his hopes and dreams crashed around him. Ransom had been right. No matter how hard he wanted to be, he’d never be truly human. Rather than continue on living this half-life where he was only a “thing,” he decided to go back to the Earth. He opened his mouth, intent on removing his shem once and for all. No one was going to control him anymore.

But… it was gone. In its place, Adam found a warm tongue. Shocked, he rushed to place his fingers below the hinge of his jaw and was met with a steady pulsing beat. His body chose that moment to become aware of the need for air, and he gasped for breath. When he tried to stand, he found his legs stiff, his muscles locked, and he was for the first time in his life, cold.

Freezing.

His newly human body tried to shake to warm itself, but he was just so cold. And tired. Exhausted even. Maybe if he just closed his eyes for a bit, he’d figure this thing out.

 

***

 

Mind hazy, Adam blinked open his eyes and tried to focus, but his vision was just as fuzzy as his brain felt. Still, he thought he could hear voices nearby. Then again maybe it was a hallucination.

“…believe you told him that, Rans!”

“-but what I’d read… was true. How was I…know?”

Was he underwater? Sure sounded like it, because words kept fading in and out.

“When…tells you…loves you, you don’t…in their face… Especially…friends.”

“…panicked. Okay? How…we even work? Better…let down easy…lead on.”

He couldn’t keep his eyes open.

Moments later, someone shook him awake, and he blinked once more. “Ransom? What’redoin’here?” his words slurred together.

“Shit! Holtzy, you’re freezing. Why? How?”

“Cause’marealboynow. CallmePino’eyo.” Sleep. He needed sleep. Cold. Too cold. Much too cold.

 

***

 

Surrounded by warmth, Adam awoke and found himself staring up at the underside of Ransom’s bunk again. Had it all been a dream? It figured.

“You’re awake!” a relieved voice rang out beside him.

Adam turned his head to see Ransom staring at him. He looked as though he hadn’t slept a wink. Maybe he hadn’t. Was it wrong, selfish even to hope that he’d stayed up all night looking for him?

“You had us worried. When you left like that and didn’t come back.”

Adam sighed. “Why do you care? I’m not capable of love remember? I’m just a _thing_.”

Ransom scrubbed his hands down his face. “You ever have to tell someone a lie, hurt them now, rather than hurt them worse later on?”

“No.”

“I thought if I made you doubt yourself, then you’d forget about it. It was easier, at least for me, than trying to explain why I’m head over heels in love with this weird guy who laughs at inappropriate moments, talks to loud and speaks in old-fashioned meter sometimes… and oh yeah, by the way, he’s also a mythical being straight out of Jewish folklore. He’s like three hundred years old, but isn’t really… alive so to speak. He’s like an android, because yeah, they’d lock me up and decommission you in a second.”

“That was not your call to make. You tried to convince me what I felt wasn’t real. Do you know…once Jack said that to me. He was six, and I have never forgotten it. But look, I have cared for a lot of people over the years, and what I feel about you is different. I know it is. I know now that the flutter I felt when I saw you was something akin to a heart skippin-”

A memory hit him like a bolt of lightning, and he bolted up in bed, smacking his forehead on the rungs of the bunk. “Son of a- Wait… that hurt!” In less than a second he was out of bed, dragging Ransom with him. Still holding him by the wrists, Adam began jumping around in a circle. “It worked! Oh my God it worked! I told you it would!”

His face was wet. Why was his face wet?”

“Holster, you’re crying.”

“I am?” he asked, voice full of exuberance. “I’m so happy!” he sobbed while laughing, and within moments, Ransom was laughing along with him. Adam stumbled over something on the floor and grabbed his foot in pain. “That hurt like hell! It’s awesome, Ransom! Oh my God! It’s my birthday today! And wait a minute. You’re in love with me too?”

“Yes. And before today, it scared me to death. How could we have been together, with you still Golem? I’d die eventually, and you’d be alone, and…I’m sorry I said you couldn’t feel love. I just wanted to protect you.”

Adam could hardly breathe, and his cheeks burned from smiling. “This is the best day of my life, and nothing will ever be as great as-”

That fluttering feeling? So much better as a human. Even when it felt like a billion butterflies were exploding in his stomach as Ransom pressed his lips to Adam’s…especially then. Now his head was cloudy for a different reason, a much better one, and when Ransom broke the kiss and pulled back, Adam chased the sensation, desperate for more. In a stupor his eyelids opened lazily, and he stood there, staring back at him, his mouth hanging open like a fish. “I stand corrected,” he said breathless, “that was awesome. Do it- do it again.”

“Easy there, big fella’. Don’t want to break you before, well breakfast.”

A loud growl echoed in the room. “What in the hell is-”

“Your stomach. Means you’re hungry. How do you feel about brunch?”

Adam grinned at him and let Ransom lead the way out of the Haus, but not before throwing a “Mes émotion ont toujour été vrai,” Jack’s way as they walked out the door. Patching things up with him was a conversation for another day.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on [Tumblr](http://secregeniusshittyknight.tumblr.com)
> 
> Quebecois French used in fic:  
> T'exist pas. T'as pas d'emotions- You're not real. You don't have feelings."
> 
> Mes émotion ont toujour été vrai- My emotions were always real


End file.
